Yes, there’s weather in space. The surface of the sun erupts with gas and plasma, ejecting charged particles (protons, electrons, and heavy ions) into the rest of the solar system at millions of miles per hour. These particles can strike Earth and the moon in just a matter of minutes. Earth’s magnetic field protects us from them, but the particles can still fry electronics and power grids on the surface and damage critical satellites that manage GPS and telecommunications services.
Space weather could be extremely dangerous for any astronauts flying to the moon or trying to live and work on a lunar outpost at the surface. Life support systems and power could shut down, and solar activity could produce life-threatening levels of radiation. “Between Apollo 16 and 17,” says Owens, “there was a huge space weather event thatwould have likely been fatal if astronauts had been on the moon at the time.”
Every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic field flips—the north and south poles trade places—and solar activity rises and falls. You might think it’s wiser to launch during the solar minimum, but that’s not necessarily been the case, since low points of solar activity usually mean there’s more exposure to galactic cosmic rays (space radiation coming from outside the solar system).
Moreover, the kind of space weather patterns we’ve been able to predict over time have to do with mild and moderate events, which don’t pose as much risk to crewed missions. But extreme solar storms—the kind that could really devastate a mission to the moon—occur at random. Many, like the infamous 1859 Carrington event, occurred during seemingly low solar activity. And these extreme events are very rare, making them hard to study.
To bolster analysis of the little data that’s been available, Owens and his team developed probability models of extreme space weather based on 150 years of solar activity records. These models simulated different frequencies of extreme storms—one had them occurring randomly, another boosted the likelihood at solar maxima, and so on.
After thousands of simulations, the researchers had enough data to determine what kinds of scenarios best aligned with what we currently know about how the sun works. They learned that extreme space weather follows the same general pattern as moderate weather: activity is higher during a solar maximum than a minimum, and severe events are more likely during stronger solar cycles than weaker ones.
And there was also one very interesting nugget unique to extreme events: they tend to occur slightly later in odd-numbered solar cycles than even ones.
We just started solar cycle 25 in December 2019. The solar maximum is broadly expected to happen in 2023–2029, so that should mark the nastiest time for space weather. “But because this is an odd cycle, the probability of extreme space weather is highest toward the end of that window—say, 2026–2029,” says Owens.
The authors say that increased risk makes it unsafe to fly missions to the moon during that period. “We’re not predicting the timing of individual events,” says Owens. “So the best advice we can give is about the probability of encountering an extreme event.” If a launch has to be delayed to 2026, it might be more desirable to delay it even further, to 2030. Otherwise, mission planners should ensure that a spacecraft has the right hardware to safeguard astronauts from an extreme event.
After all, it’s not as if we can just bring astronauts back from the moon in time once we know a bad solar storm is on the way. Currently, our best warning systems for space weather give us a heads-up of a few hours to a few days—and those forecasts are even worse for predicting catastrophic storms.
Dan Baker, a space physics researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, thinks the study stands up well, emphasizing that research like this “should be taken seriously and should be folded into [mission] planning.” But he’s not completely confident that the statistical work of this investigation should be adopted as a recommendation for scrubbing any lunar mission between 2026 and 2029. “Solar storm events and solar energetic particles are a very real risk for astronauts outside the protective envelope of Earth’s magnetosphere,” he says. ”However, I think that prudent steps can be taken to guard against the effects of such severe space weather. With an active and effective operational space weather alert and warning system, I believe the threats can be made manageable.” Risks could be tolerable if there was, say, an early warning space weather system that observed the entire sun 24/7, and a module of a spacecraft or lunar outpost that could specifically protect astronauts from such events.
Although an extreme event might be rare, it could mean the difference between life and death on a mission to the moon. Whether NASA and others are willing to take that risk remains to be seen.
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania.
Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.
Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.
A changing way of life
The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.
Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.
One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.
Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.
The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.
Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.
But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures
The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.
Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.
According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.
Mapping out a generative AI pathway
One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.
The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.
Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.
All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.
The benefits of third-party experience
Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).
Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”
